Milestones

Retired Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme
Court, one of the foremost legal architects of the civil-rights
movement and the first black Justice on the Court, died of heart
failure Jan. 24 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
He was 84.

Justice Marshall, who formally retired from the High Court in
October 1991, had a legal career that spanned six decades. (See
Education Week, July 31, 1991.) Appointed by President Johnson in 1967
to a liberal-majority Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, he later
carved out a role as one of the great dissenters to the Court's
increasingly conservative rulings.

But he made his most lasting mark in the field of education as the
legal director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for 23
years before he became a federal judge. He spearheaded the civil-rights
group's assault on the doctrine that allowed the separation of blacks
and whites in schools, colleges, and elsewhere.

After winning Supreme Court victories in the realm of higher
education, he argued for the plaintiffs in five consolidated cases that
challenged the constitutionality of racially "separate but equal''
schools that the High Court had upheld in 1896.

In its unanimous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the
Supreme Court held that "separate educational facilities are inherently
unequal.''

Justice Marshall wrote vigorous dissents in a 1974 decision barring
a desegregation plan that would have crossed the Detroit city lines
into the suburbs and in a 1983 decision upholding a Minnesota law
granting tax credits to parents who send their children to private
schools.

In a statement, President Clinton called Justice Marshall "a giant
in the quest for human rights and equal opportunity.''

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